Other Worlds

Tag: short story

  • Fantastic Defenders

    I have recently served as co-editor of a short story anthology, Fantastic Defenders, with my fellow writer, David Keener. The official release was during Balticon. I had fun writing the introduction, and here it is, to give you an idea of what the book’s aim is: One place to begin, in talking about fantastic defenders,…

  • “Ambidextrose” by Jay Werkheiser

    “Ambidextrose” by Jay Werkheiser is from the October 2012 issue of Analog. It builds its situation from a problem of chemical incompatibility between human settlers of an alien planet and the exobiotic native life, useless to Earth organisms because the organic molecules are chemically wrong-handed. Wrong-handed sugars are nutritionally inert for humans, the amino acids…

  • “Nell” by Karen Hesse

    “Nell” is a new story up on Tor.com this week. Read it here. (It’s reprinted from an anthology, What You Wish For, published by Book Wish Foundation, 2012) The story is told from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl who’s been 12 for about a hundred years, but in different bodies: One winter night in…

  • “Star Soup” by Chris Willrich in Asimov’s

    I’m currently reading the Sept 2012 issue of Asimov’s, and I haven’t gotten through the whole issue yet, but I’ve gone back to read “Star Soup” by Chris Willrich. I find it a highly pleasurable story. I was a little surprised to like it so much, because after the first two pages my expectation was…

  • “We just like to talk about stories”

    The alternate titles that I considered for this post were “The Purpose of ‘Other Worlds’” and “I just like to talk about stories.” The first was boring and the second, while true, misses the crucial point of talking about stories with other people who read and appreciate fiction. I went with “we” in the title…

  • Hugo Awards: My Pick for Best Short Story

    I’ve decided which of the five stories I hope will win. It’s “Movement” by Nancy Fulda, for its beautifully unified character, voice, and story. The protagonist is convincing, and the author’s hand is sure but not too heavy.

  • Hugo Awards: Best Short Story Contenders (5)

    Fifth and last, E. Lily Yu’s “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” from Clarkesworld Magazine. Read it here. A race of wasps common around the village of Yiwei is discovered to construct nests that unfold into beautiful colored maps of the surrounding country. Once this discovery is made, the nests are taken by the villagers…

  • Hugo Awards: Best Short Story Contenders (4)

    Fourth on the ballot for Best Short Story: “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu. You can read it here. Jack is the son of an American father and a Chinese mother, who was a mail-order bride. The marriage is a successful one, but at age 10 Jack becomes aware of the ethnic differences between himself…

  • Hugo Awards: Best Short Story Contenders (3)

    Hannah, a teenage girl with “temporal autism,” is the narrator. Hannah is highly intelligent and is a talented dancer, but she speaks rarely and is disinclined to make human connection with others. Her parents are considering a new treatment, synaptic grafting, as a cure for her condition.

  • Hugo Awards: Best Short Story Contenders (2)

    In Mike Resnick’s “The Homecoming,” on the Hugo ballot for best short story, a young man has been transformed into insectoid alien creature, to his father’s horror. Philip, we learn, is an exobiologist who undertook the transformation in order to study an alien world. The story follows what happens when Philip returns home to visit…